The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, launched in 2001, set the standard
for open-access online course materials as the first initiative of its kind. In what continues to be the highestprofile project in this field, MIT pledged to offer freely available
web-based versions of syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists, assignments, and other materials for virtually all of its courses. OCW
thus constituted a major institutional commitment to transparency, providing, in the words of former Provost Robert Brown, “a
window into MIT on a very fundamental level”—its classrooms.1

Though the committee that initiated OCW did not set out to
create a free offering, it opted to do so when consultant studies
revealed that a fee-based effort, akin to Fathom and AllLearn, was
highly unlikely to generate sufficient revenues. Subsequently, the
project’s open availability has become a cornerstone of its success.
MIT President Charles Vest, OCW’s key champion at the university, capitalized on the idea’s novelty to parlay personal relationships with foundation leaders into an extraordinary amount of
start-up funding. MIT OCW has also received ample attention
from the Institute’s peers and in the popular press. Though the
open courseware field has expanded greatly in the years since
OCW’s launch (in part due to MIT’s success in encouraging other
institutions to follow its lead), it remains the best-known—and
best-funded—initiative of its kind.

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses.
Contributors: Taylor Walsh - Author.
Publisher: Princeton University Press.
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ.
Publication year: 2011.
Page number: 57.

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